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Monday, 19 June 2017

At the Kohl-face of European History

“You didn't just pay lip service to the goal of
overcoming the division of Europe and Germany... Rather, you put yourself at
the forefront of those who encouraged us on the way to unity”.

Helmut Kohl

The Unlikely Couple

Alphen, Netherlands. 19 June. They made an unlikely couple. The September 1984 picture of French President
Francois Mitterand and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died last week, holding hands on the
charnel ground of Verdun is an iconic European moment. One, a former French
resistance fighter, and the other forced into the Hitler Youth in April 1945 at
the very end of World War Two. For West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that was
exactly the point. In that moment of reconciliation Kohl effectively completed the
work of the Federal Republic’s first chancellor, the great Konrad Adenauer.
Alongside his French colleagues Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet Adenauer had set
out to ‘normalise’ Germany’s relationship with the rest of Europe by ensuring a
European Germany, not a German Europe. Kohl completed that mission.

For all the symbolism of Verdun Kohl was more a manager of history than
a creator of it. What are often touted
as his two towering achievements, German reunification and the creation of the Euro,
happened on his watch but were not envisioned by him. He also oversaw the history-loaded return of German
political power from sleepy Bonn (Le Carré’s “A Small Town in Germany”) to the
old Imperial capital Berlin. And yet none
of these momentous events were part of any grand Kohl dessin. In 1989, when he
heard that the Berlin Wall was being torn down he first wanted confirmation. He
simply could not believe it was happening.

Carpe Diem

And yet Kohl seized his strategic moment with both of his huge hands. After
a shaky start to reunification, when he initially refused to confirm the
post-war German-Polish border, Kohl showed he had an increasingly certain
political hand. With the crucial support of US President George H.W. Bush, he first
reassured France, and then Britain and the other European partners that a reunited
Germany would not seek to dominate Europe. He also moved quickly to cement reunification
at home by offering East Germans parity between the Deutschmark and the Ostmark.
It was a move that made little economic or financial sense, but very good political
sense. He even sweetened Russia’s withdrawal
from Central and Eastern Europe by providing huge amounts of aid to Moscow,
although it failed to prevent the August 1991 fall of Gorbachev, and the final collapse
of the Soviet Union.

It is perhaps Kohl’s pragmatism over the Euro which best demonstrates
Kohl’s strategic and political art. He was prepared to do whatever he saw as
necessary to secure what he saw as the German, and by extension the European
interest. The two were often confused in
the Kohl mind. He did not initially like
the French idea of a common currency because it meant Germany giving up the Deutschmark,
regarded by many Christian Democrats and wider society as the ultimate
safeguard against the hyper-inflation of the inter-bellum that had helped pave the way to power for Hitler and
the Nazis. However, he accepted the euro as the price Germany had to pay to
ensure a reunified Germany was a European Germany.

Anti-British?

Was Kohl anti-British? Kohl’s
relationship with Britain was far less amicable than with either France or the
US, and he accorded the British far less respect than he accorded the Russians. He also refused to accord the British the
same respect he accorded the Americans for the liberation of Europe, as evinced
by the closeness of his relationship to President Reagan. His relationship with
that other great political titan of the period, Margaret Thatcher, was also infamously
prickly. In a controversial February 1996 speech in Louvain, Belgium, Kohl
revealed the extent to which World War Two defined his political creed.
However, in so doing he upset the British by suggesting that European integration
was “…in reality a question of war and peace in the twenty-first century”. At
the same time he also understood the importance of keeping Britain in the ‘European
Project’, and was prepared to make concessions in European treaties to that
end. He would have deeply regretted Brexit.

In fact, my own modest brush with Kohl demonstrated to me that he was
not at all anti-British. It also showed that his attitude towards the French
was more nuanced than suggested by the public image. In 1996 I was taken to
lunch in Paris on the Boulevard New York by a senior official during which a possible
EU security and defence demarche to be led by Britain and France was discussed.
The next day I travelled to London to discuss European defence with a senior
member of prime minister-in-waiting Tony Blair’s team. As promised, I reported the conversation I
had had in Paris verbatim, but added the codicil that Paris wished to keep
Anglo-French discussions discreet.

Later that week I was due to travel to Bonn where I was to visit the
Bundeskanzleramt (Chancellery) and meet Kohl’s senior foreign and security
policy advisors. During my meeting in London I asked if I should mention the
conversations I had had in Paris and London. My interlocutor said “of course”. Blair, like Kohl, was at the time keen to ‘reset’
British-German relations. When I got to Bonn I duly reported the Paris
conversation to Chancellor Kohl’s senior foreign policy advisor. He laughed, “Don’t
the French realise that we and the British do occasionally talk to each other?”
The eventual result (in which I claim no role) was the 1998 St Malo Declaration
and the 1999 Helsinki Declaration which paved the way for an enhanced EU role
in security and defence.

German and European

There was much over which I disagreed with Kohl, not least his
conflation at times of the German and European interest, a habit which afflicts
German leaders to this day. He was also prone to missteps on the international
stage that bordered on hubris. For example, he badly misinterpreted the 1991 break-up
of Yugoslavia, and ignored British and French warnings with disastrous
consequences. And yet is ledger is more positive than negative. A decade or so ago, when I was writing a book
on post-war European security and defence for Oxford, which is of course
brilliant and very reasonably-priced, I was struck by the importance of this
man to Europe’s enduring stability.

Adenauer had once said that he was a German who would always be German,
but that he was also a European who would always be European. For Adenauer read
Kohl. In an April 1997 speech to commemorate the 1967 death of Konrad Adenauer Helmut
Kohl quoted his predecessor. “The most important thing”, he said, “is courage”.
Kohl might well have been speaking about himself.

He ended his life in his beloved Ludwigshafen in sadness and some might
say anger, following the suicide of his wife and his forced removal from office at the hands of his protege, one Angela Merkel. Still, for me Helmut Kohl will always
be remembered as a towering figure of post-war German and European politics,
both literally and figuratively. As such
he deserves to be respected because for a time he was the very Kohl-face of European
history, and let’s face it, there are few such leaders around these days.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Vice-President, Atlantic Treaty Association, Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.